Design of the Built Environment Reality
'(13037873) BE1380 – Cityspace' Modern Architecture From 1945 modern architecture started to boom all across the world as the new style to use in cities and in suburbs. It is normally describes as a set of building styles with similar characteristics. It was all about simplification in the building form and creating a function first then then the form as appose to just designing a really nice building that doesn't work very well for the client. Rebuilding after the Second World War After the Second World War London was in a terrible state and was in need of large scale rebuilding of a lot of its areas. However before the war ended Patrick Abercrombie & John Henry Forshaw created the County of London Plan in 1943 and the Greater London Plan in 1944, the greater London plan is a more revised version of the county of London plan by only Patrick Abercrombie. The County of London Plan had five main problems that Patrick & John wanted to hit which were traffic congestion, depressed housing, not enough open spaces, houses and industries mixed together and urban sprawl. It did try to counter congestion by designing ring roads around London which partially came to succession with the majority of their suggestions coming to fruition in the 1960’s. In the Greater London Plan a year later Patrick Abercrombie revised the County of London Plan into the creation of the green belt around the city to restrict building, the creation of new towns outside of London but would accommodate a lot of the population that had been displaced (these towns ended up being Basildon, Bracknell and Harlow) and finally the expansion of some already existing towns outside of London such as Swindon. This was very successful and did solve a lot of problems that London was having at the time. In 1949 in London the first 10-storey council block was opened in Holborn, which is in central London. High rise housing was another Abercrombie recommendation and suggested as the biggest solution to replace the housing that was destroyed during the war. By the 1960’s (11 years) over five hundred thousand flats had been built proving that the high rise buildings was defiantly a viable solution to the problems of the displaced population. The New Towns Act created on 1946 allowed the government to designate areas as new towns and allow development corporations to start building new towns, as a result of this several new towns were built across England accommodating a lot of the population whose houses were destroyed got destroyed during the Second World War. An example of some of the new towns that were built as a result of this act is Milton Keynes, Washington, Peterlee and Welwyn Garden City etc. Architecturally the new towns differed, some were built to a more traditional English look and some were built to the modernism style which was starting to emerge more often in the second part of the century, especially when the designers have a chance to design a whole town. As you can see from the picture above Welwyn Garden City was designed with the more traditional 20th century look in mind, however i know Washington does have some 1960's modern architecture in its city. This act was revised in 1965 and 1981.